A baseball blog written by a Fighters fangirl who moved back to the US after several years in Japan. Probably likely to continue being about Japanese amateur baseball and bashing the Yomiuri Giants, but who knows what the future holds.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Draft 2015 Liveblogging!

EDIT: Liveblogging part has been moved to below the draft result table; pre-draft comments still at top. As of 5:50pm Oct 23 PST, the entire draft result table is finished, including ikusei!

I was in Japan 2 weeks ago, so I did manage to buy a few of the draft magazines, so that should help with player backgrounds, although since they publish them before the deadline for guys submitting their draft-hopeful 志望届 intent letters, about half of the guys in the magazines aren't actually going into the draft. Shrug. I'll hopefully catch a stream online of the TV part, but otherwise I'll just be watching the picks come in on various news sources such as Nikkan Sports, Sponichi, Sanspo, etc as usual.

Not sure who I'm really emotionally invested in this year aside from the Sanko boys (please for the love of god do not let Takayama go to the Giants), maybe Ohshiro-kun (Koji that is, I've given up on Motoshi ever getting drafted now, sadly), and a bunch of the industrial league guys. Well, and like everyone I wonder what'll happen to Rui Okoe, and another lesser-known half kid in the list named Julius Higuma. (BTW, for the three of you who might wonder what ever happened to Teikyo's Naville Ariga, he apparently works at a Maruhan store in Sendai...)

Predraft update 8pm: Shun Takayama broke his wrist on Sunday, apparently, though it was only discovered and in the news today. Specifically, he broke the hamate bone in his wrist; after reading about it on Wikipedia it doesn't sound that bad, apparently this just happens to golfers/baseball players and is often a hairline fracture that doesn't show up (infact they say he had an X-Ray after the game and it showed up normal but then an MRI later in the week showed the fracture). However, Yakult at least has said they will still choose him in the first round. That suits me just fine :)

Takayama is easily one of the best college batter/fielders in the draft this year, he broke the career hits record in Tokyo Big 6 by accumulating 131 hits over 4 years -- this is no small feat, the record was set at 127 hits by Shigeru Takada back in 1967 and stood for 48 years until now. He was a member of the Nichidai Sanko team that won Koshien in 2011 and that I was a crazy enough fan of to dedicate an entire tag on here just to their team. Even after his freshman year at Meiji I was already predicting him as the most likely guy from their team to go pro, so go figure. I don't think this wrist injury will affect his career much.

1am: and the feed is live! (Thanks Dani for the link!)
1:02am: watching all the old dudes in their suits filing in (whoa Nashida! Ramichan! Tanishige!)
1:05am: big cheer for new manager Kanemoto (Tigers) coming in, probably biggest yet.
1:06am: another huge cheer for Kimiyasu Kudoh (Hawks)

1:08am: Long explanation of the rules. If you don't know: first round is crazy free-for-all with ties broken by a lottery, then they go in waiver order and reverse waiver order for the next rounds (hence the actual order I have below). They're giving counts for all the student players eligible in the draft (it's about 160; there were 78 high school and 81 university letters submitted).

And a speech from the commissioner and a commercial break and THEN we will get the first round underway!

And of course the DRAGONS get Ogasawara which means I don't get to reuse my old Fighters Ogasawara jersey as I was vaguely hoping for a few seconds there.

1:50am: Well, now the Fighters get to choose a first-round pick and then we go in waiver order. Bleh.

First Round, Take 3:Fighters: Kenta Uehara, P, Meiji University

I had a feeling that would happen. Why couldn't we have gotten Sachiya that way instead if we wanted a big lefty from Meiji? Unlucky year.

Okay, they're taking a break for a bit and the TV will probably cut out.

First round thoughts:

No guys were taken from the industrial leagues (or indie but that would be really weird).

It was awfully university-heavy: 8 out of 12.

While typing in info I just realized that Kenta Uehara is an even more statistical anomaly in some ways because he's so huge but he's also the youngest you can possibly be in your class (Japan starts school in April, so everyone in a year is the same age, the oldest in the class were born in April and the youngest born in March -- you often end up with a lot more athletes being born in April-May-June just because they tended to always be the biggest kids in their class).

2:10am and the draft is continuing with Rakuten taking Ryota Yoshimochi and Yokohama taking Kento Kumabara in the 2nd round (after a long interview with Rami explaining exactly why he's happy to get Imanaga). And first shakaijin guy is Taisuke Kondoh from Panasonic, going to Orix.

BTW, for the most part from now on I'm just going to go look up guys and fill in the table except for commentary when guys I care about get drafted.

I had joked that Yokohama had to take Funamoto or Azegami in the second round to continue their streak of taking my Hosei boys and running them into the ground but we'll have to see what actually happens there :)

2:18 nevermind here is the part where I go off about Ryota Sekiya going to Lotte and Seishiro Sakamoto going to Hanshin, I guess. Sekiya was a year ahead of Sachiya at Nichidai Sanko AND at Meiji and he's also a good pitcher. And then Seishiro Sakamoto -- Meiji captain this year, great guy, great catcher. He's from Kansai -- infact he was a year or two behind Tetsuto Yamada at Riseisha HS -- so I guess it's ok for him to go to Hanshin -- but I'm really worried he'll get stuck behind Umeno :(

2:19 OMG THE FIGHTERS TAKE TAKAYUKI KATOH IN THE SECOND ROUND!!!

Super excited about this one. He's a big tall pile of arms and legs but I've seen him pitch and he's good. Watched him throw a shutout against ENEOS last year -- I was there to cheer ENEOS but came out of it impressed by Katoh and even got a photo with him -- infact I've been slacking off on posting names because I went to dig up that photo :) (see photo tweet here)

2:33 excited that Takuya Kinoshita finally got drafted -- I remember him filling out a form for it back in 2013 but he didn't get picked then

2:37 Koji Ohshiro! To Orix! Now I guess that means my friend K is going to go watch a LOT of Orix games to see Sachiya AND Koji :)

2:50 in passing I wanted to note that Yakult took Julius Higuma that I'd mentioned earlier (yay!) and Kotaro Yamasaki from Nichidai (yay!)

3:27 I was just slogging away translating names into the table when suddenly i heard the FIGHTERS TAKE TOSHITAKE YOKOO FROM KEIO/SANKO/WHATEVER OMG! One of my Sanko boys is going to be a Fighter! holy CRAP!

5:43am: Hi! I've translated the main rounds but haven't gotten to the ikusei draft yet. It's basically summarized by saying "The Giants drafted a bunch of BCL guys and a few other semi-interesting names popped up". I'll do it sometime tomorrow.

Man, this was a pretty insane draft after all. Still feeling pretty awful about Takayama and on the Fighters missing both their lotteries but whatever. I think it'll all work out in the end. Now my goal for Arizona next year is clearly to get a photo between Arihara and Uehara since they're both so huge.

Next day 5:50pm: I'm done entering all the ikusei!

BTW, I still stand by my assertion that there are always going to be more athletes born near the start of the school year, and this draft class doesn't contradict that at all:

I'm really not sure. I feel like in 2009 I either decided it was Naville on my own or maybe saw it spelled that way in a news article somewhere. (now if I search for "Naville Ariga" I get my own articles, though.)

Hirahara, ne. He was the Rikkio captain in 2013. I used to chat with him from time to time... him and Michiori Okabe, both Teikyo->Rikkio, one year apart. I don't think I've seen Hirahara listed anywhere in any of the draft magazines or articles so I doubt he's in the mix. But you never know. I'd love to see Michiori try next year, and he's a better player than Hirahara by far. Hirahara spent most of his time at Rikkio either in right field or occasionally first base -- he never pitched in an official game. He pitched like 1 1/3 inning of a game in the Rookie Tournament in fall 2010 and was terrible and they never put him on a mound again. http://www.big6.gr.jp/game/rookie/2010a/2010a_rookie_kr.html

It's kind of a shame, but that's just how it goes, I guess.

As for the rest of that 2009 team, Taguchi went to Nittaidai and works for some sports training place now I think, captain Satoh was at Toyodai and now plays for TDK, Haraguchi got drafted by the Hanshin Tigers and sent into oblivion like so many HS catchers they draft, Yoshioka went to Kinkidai and then I have no idea, and Go Matsumoto now plays for the Fighters. No idea what happened to Kaneko or Hoshi-kun. Takuro Itoh was on the Baystars and now plays in the indie leagues, and Yasuaki Yamasaki is now on the Baystars and Michiori Okabe plays for ENEOS and... Shota Suzuki ended up at Tokaidai but I don't know where he is now either.

It looks like Kanemoto had nothing to do with it he just gave up once Manaka reacted triumphantly. Kanemoto never even bothered to look at the paper. The league people realized the error when they collected the papers.

Oh, weird. I'll edit something in when I move my commentary to the bottom. It was just so weird since like, Manaka celebrated, the rest of the internet celebrated, I was typing things into my table, and then suddenly I heard bizarre stuff coming from the TV so I didn't see exactly what went down and had to rely on Twitter for details (where almost everyone was also like WAIT WHAT JUST HAPPENED)

I'm really sorry -- I've seen Juri Hara pitch a few times, as a kid who came to Toyo Univ from Toyodai Himeji HS having pitched at Koshien he was considered a big deal even as a freshman (a la Masahiro Inui) -- he's not bad -- but I still think Takayama was the better player by far and possibly more what Yakult actually needed (someone to kick the outfield guys in the ass to do better to keep their jobs). Real sadface, especially for the few minutes I thought Yakult was actually getting Takayama.

I think the latter half of the Swallows draftees will be interesting to see what happens with though. Higuma, Yamasaki, and Watanabe all have some sides to them that I need to research more :)